Sketches in Christian Origins

Verbal Aspect and Exegesis

At the end of the day . . . or ten years on (nod to Led Zeppelin!), we need must return to the realization that verb theory is only profitable insofar as it contributes to the philological task. We have a language fragment in an ancient and composite text; we must proceed with care and attentiveness to literary context and background, comparative and historical linguistics, typological and theoretical linguistics, and the intuition of the tradition grammars, holding our conclusions tentatively. But push ahead we must and stop stalling over theory that seems increasingly to offer no real profit.

Yes, if someone’s verbal aspect theory does not help with the interpretation or even the composition of text, then it’s not doing its job.

9 Comments…

This is kind of quote is only true if one’s discipline is biblical studies. If the philological task is not the goal, then one’s approach to verbal morphosyntax might not be profitable to philology, but it might be immensely profitable for general linguistic theory, grammaticalization theory, etc. A contribution to typology is, by itself, an important contribution. If its not beneficial for the exegete, that’s fine. But it was not necessarily intending to be.

But that’s my point. Your priority is exegesis. John’s priority is exegesis. If you read this quote to a historical linguist, they’d say that while they want to know why the text means one thing and not the other, but only as a means to an end for learning something about the nature language evolution. Conversely, your interest in language evolution would be motivated by wanting to understand the text. Your endpoint is their path and their path is your endpoint.

Thanks for linking to my post, Stephen. I’m embarrassed by the typos; clearly I need a new proofreader! To jump in and comment on your debate here with Mike, I would observe that extremely few scholars have the expertise in both linguistics and ancient Hebrew and even fewer the interest to draw insights from them for the theoretical linguistic goal of talking about universal grammar or similar goal. True, we can do “descriptive linguistic” study of the text, which may contribute to linguistic typology or the like, but I’m a bit pessimistic that our data is complete enough to make any significant contribution alongide the wealth of living language data. The same would be true of most ancient languages. Additionally the philo logical approach to teaching these languages (biblical, ancient Semitic, etc.) reinforces the marginalization of these texts as the basis of theoretical linguistic study. The problem is philologists losing sight of their task in the midst of the theoretical discussions; often they no longer offer help either to the exegete or the linguist.

@John: I think that for the most part you’re right. But there are a couple point to make here:

(1) Descriptive linguists in living languages have generally accepted that you can describe 80-90% of a language’s grammar with a 300,000 word corpus (I don’t have a citation for this, I learned it in class at GIAL). And that’s sufficient for many, many typological claims. And with that in mind, there actually quite a bit you can do with ancient languages for general linguists–e.g. Silvia Luraghi’s work on Hittite comes to mind here.

(2) I don’t see the issue of how few scholars there are who are strong enough in linguistics and Hebrew (or Greek or any Ancient language) to be particularly problematic. In virtually all cases, typological work involves linguists working through the grammatical descriptions of language they don’t know and relying on the expertise of that handful of linguists whose specialty is, say, Kewa or Supyrie. And for that reason, the relevance or usefulness of ancient languages for typological study isn’t really an issue of not having enough specialists Rather, it is an issue of those specialists generally not writing for a linguistic audience.

But in a sense, this is connected to what you said in your post, if Hebraists would be willing to accept the already standardized terminology of the linguistic world, then that problem would be entirely solved. The descriptions would be written and they would be understandable for typologists interested in looking at how ancient languages relate to various other human languages and exegetes would have a consistent and far less confusing set of terms for working toward understanding the text.

(3) With all that said, I suppose one of the challenges of Hebrew and other ancient Semitic languages involve the fact that while you have a half million+ word corpus, that corpus covers centuries (millennia?), which results in more difficulty in making claims relevant to general linguistics. But I’ll defer to you on that one, since the amount of text I have for the 100BCE – 100CE is easily a couple million words by itself. Greek doesn’t really have the challenges of the languages that you’re interested in.

Thanks for jumping, John! Mike and I do a lot of our work in Greek, which has a huge corpus and a time depth spanning many millennia. I believe it is the second-most studied language (after English). But even here the philological approach has marginalized ancient Greek texts for broader linguistics. Fortunately, there seems to be a new generation in classical Greek that is producing the scholarship that will help immensely the Greek that I study.

Now that you’re here, let me say that I enjoyed your dissertation very much, esp. the first chapter, which is broadly applicable outside of Hebrew. I don’t have your new book here in Sweden, but I hear that it is even better than before. What’s the biggest change in your revision?

I had to chuckle at Mike’s first comment above, especially this: “If its not beneficial for the exegete, that’s fine.”

I suspect that a few people used to hear very similar comments come out of my mouth earlier in my career. I still demand a clear theory and methodological rigour. But in my environment I am also all too aware that linguists rarely pay attention to what we’re doing with ancient languages. So while it is certainly possible that something we do will be, as Mike says, “immensely profitable for general linguistic theory …,” it is simply highly unlikely. I’ve had too many passing experiences with general linguists to be youthfully optimistic. Those, like Elan Dresher or Talmy Givon, who participate in some way (e.g., the recent volume on BH diachrony from Eisenbrauns) are the exceptions that prove the rule (and their interest in Hebrew is largely due to their cultural backgrounds, not because someone pointed out how theoretically useful it was to study ancient Hebrew).

I also suspect that is generally the case that, at some point, for those of who found our way into linguistics because we loved a particular language or corpus, a longer view of linguistic theory (and the never ending shifts of any given theory) eventually pushes us from such detachment from the texts themselves back to philology done with linguistic informedness. I think that this is where John and I have both arrived. And I think that this is probably why a few of the previous generation were patient with my brashness—they guessed that I’d mellow with time.